A north Dublin GAA club has been ordered to pay a former coach more than €26,000 for unfair dismissal after ruling he was made redundant without an “objective and fair” consultation process.
Johnny Beggs told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in September that he had been involved with Skerries Harps his whole life and that he had “lost friends and family” over the manner of his dismissal.
“It was decided well before any consultation process,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d be sitting in a courtroom begging for crumbs. After what we’ve gone through, personally, I wouldn’t go back to that club, that role.”
His complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against Skerries Harps GAA club was upheld by the WRC in a decision published this morning.
The club argued that its finances were “drained” after the pandemic and that Mr Beggs’s role as a coach was redundant since the Dublin county board was paying for a games promotion officer with similar duties.
Committee member Anthony Weldon gave evidence that the club was aiming to achieve cost savings by switching to a more “volunteer-led” model.
He gave evidence of a series of consultation meetings he and the club chairman Paul Donnelly held with Mr Beggs in May and June 2020.
He said no suitable alternatives were identified.
“In my mind and in my feeling, I was never given a chance to explain to the people who made the decision how to save the role,” he said, adding that he was “never given an answer – it was all ‘confidentiality’”.
Mr Weldon said Mr Beggs had made a GDPR request for the minutes of the club executive’s meetings concerning his position at the time of the consultation process but the club regarded these as ciconfidential”.
“You just don’t provide them, otherwise every decision would be open to public scrutiny and that’s not how a company would run and it’s not how a voluntary organisation should run,” Mr Weldon said.
Mr Beggs said he was qualified to be a barman or a caretaker and that he would have been happy to continue coaching on a part-time basis or as a volunteer for a time – confirming to adjudicating officer Brian Dalton that he put this in writing in May that year.
Mr Weldon said it would have been “unfair to get rid of a pitch man if the coach is redundant”.
“There were incumbents, there were sitting tenants,” he said of the roles identified by Mr Beggs.
In his decision, adjudicating officer Brian Dalton disagreed.
He said there was not a “fair and reasonable” selection process for the redundancy as “no adequate consultation took place”.
“In this case while a genuine redundancy situation existed the selection process was rigid; was devoid of meaningful consultation; failed to have regard to the complainant’s length of service, [and] his previous relevant experience that could have allowed him to be redeployed to bar work and/or caretaking duties,” Mr Dalton wrote.
Mr Dalton ordered the club to pay Mr Beggs €26,083 for 52 weeks’ lost earnings on top of the redundancy payment already made to him.